Creating History
Aamir Khan steers away from mushy romance in lush locations in his first production, Lagaan. The formula-busting period film on colonial arrogance, backed by good acting, promises to give Indian cinema a classy makeover.

Governance On
The Hold
Absent ministers, coalition politics and an unwell prime minister paralyse all decision making at the Centre. With business sentiments diving and industrial growth rate receding, the alarm bells have begun to ring.

Super Clinic Inc.
Patients will be treated as customers with some companies hoping to revolutionise the Rs 60,000-crore private healthcare market. They are setting up a chain of neighbourhood health clinics that will provide quality medical care.

Fostering Ill-will
The arrest of Jayalalitha's foster son may be linked
to the sour relationship.

Crescent Classroom
An organisation has given madarsa education in the state a communal slant.

BOOKS

Colonial Cousin

When Yes Minister comes to Dilli durbar

By Ravi Shankar

As a donor of prototypes, the British Empire has done much for India. Democracy for one thing, and its accompanying real estate-starting with Lutyens' Delhi and other colonial power edifices all over. And for those who have come to inhabit those whitewashed buildings representing the behemoth which is the government with its millions of incestuous designations, car pools and Kafkaesque rigmaroles, the Indian Administrative Service is the phantom of that opera. So it comes as no surprise that the successful Yes Minister teleseries which once convulsed the British sofa class and amused Indian televiewers should now get a Hindi avatar. Ji Mantriji, a rip-roaring television series which is unabashedly based on its Anglo-Saxon parent, is now a book, told as the diaries of Suryaprakash Singh, a new minister in Delhi's portals of power.

What this book unwittingly does is demolish the image of the Indian politician as a venal, corrupt, power drunk parasite and shows him, in the form of Singh, as a bemused political animal caught in a sophisticated zoo run by bureaucrats. Jugran Dayal, cabinet secretary, remarks that an open government is a contradiction: "You can be open-or you can have government." Flummoxing the minister at every turn-stymieing his political adviser Dikshit, embarrassing him in the US computer incident, seeing that he has no driver or car to take him to a cocktail party as a result of an austerity drive-Ji Mantriji shows that the real power behind the throne is the Eternal Bureaucracy, not the ministers who are eventually "house trained" by the IAS. "Politicians need activity," it is explained, "it is their substitute for achievement." Hmmm, clever.

The book has quite a lot of activity, and does achieve the desired effect. A whimsical look at the Dilli durbar, where good intentions pave the road to a minister's hell full of death threats, a nudist demonstration from his own daughter who defends monkeys and the staccatto scepticism of his wife, Chandni. And behind it, omniscient and omnipresent, lurk the figures of his bureaucrats, Mathur and Kaul, whose triumph lies in the successful caricature of political power.

MetroScape

Pak Unplugged
Fresh-faced youngsters were cheering through qawwalis, pop songs and poetry reading at India Habitat Centre, Delhi. The occasion? A week-long workshop, "Rehumanizing the Other", was all about promoting neighbourly feelings in a period of bad press.
more...

Looking Glass

Mumbai Exhibition:
"Potters in Peril"

Chennai Coffee Bar: Barista

Bangalore Resort: Angsana Oasis Spa and Resort

The Delhi Government's campaign to clean up the Yamuna was impressive but needs to backed up by measures that can weed out the root causes of the pollution. INDIA TODAY's Special Correspondent Sayantan Chakravarty reports in Long Drive